C. C. Clay papers, 1811-1925

Source Collection

This digital collection comprises selected materials from the following archival collection at David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library:

C. C. Clay papers 1811-1925

Collection #RL.00230 | 20 Linear Feet

ABSTRACT
Clement Claiborne Clay (1816-1882) was a lawyer, U. S. Senator, Confederate diplomat, planter, and enslaver from Huntsville, Madison County, Alabama. He was married to Virginia Carolina (Tunstall) Clay (1825-1915). His father, Clement Comer Clay (1789-1866) was a U.S. Congressman and Governor of Alabama. Collection includes personal, business, and political correspondence, bills of sale for enslaved people, accounts, diaries, memoranda, college notes, scrapbooks, and clippings of Clement Claiborne Clay, and of his father, Clement Comer Clay; his mother, Susanna Claiborne Withers Clay; his wife, Virginia Caroline Tunstall Clay; and brothers, Hugh Lawson Clay and John Withers Clay. Letters deal with family matters, including Alabama and Washington, D.C., social life, education, the management of cotton plantations, bills of sale for and correspondence regarding enslaved people, civic affairs in Huntsville; state and national politics and elections; Clay Sr.'s governorship; Clay Jr.'s service in both the U.S. and Confederate senates; ante-bellum politics; the organization of the Confederacy; Reconstruction politics, including Clay Jr.'s arrest, imprisonment, and his wife's efforts to obtain his release; Clay Jr.'s efforts to retrieve his property and re-establish farming operations, and to settle his father's estate; Virginia Clay's dissatisfaction with Reconstruction period social life, her tour of Europe, 1884-1885, and her efforts to operate the plantation after her husband's death.

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